


pushing through bodies

by ilgaksu



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - 18th century, M/M, alternate universe - french revolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 14:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8404543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: Versailles is gone. Candle in hand, Ronan finds Kavinsky in the Queen’s bedchamber. He’s got one foot braced against the overturned chest of drawers, cracked open with the drawers discarded like splayed ribs; he’s got one hand overreaching for the chandelier.“You’ll fall,” Ronan says, and has the brief, whip-swift pleasure of watching the set of Kavinsky’s shoulders startle.





	

Versailles is gone. Candle in hand, Ronan finds Kavinsky in the Queen’s bedchamber. He’s got one foot braced against the overturned chest of drawers, cracked open with the drawers discarded like splayed ribs; he’s got one hand overreaching for the chandelier.

“You’ll fall,” Ronan says, and has the brief, whip-swift pleasure of watching the set of Kavinsky’s shoulders startle. The feeling radiates along his skin like the ache of a beating the day after. Kavinsky goes very still for a moment, then turns to look at Ronan. His eyes are shadows in the night and he laughs and says, “It is you. Lynch. Don’t talk too loud. They don’t like foreigners these days.”

The wax from the candle runs down Ronan’s hand and hisses as it lands on his skin. He’s had worse from church. He says, “They never liked us.”

“It’s us now, is it?” Kavinsky murmurs, “I can hold to that.”

Ronan wants to say _they never liked you_ , but Ronan does not lie. Ronan is the son of a poor boy done good, son of an Irish tradesman who bought his ticket through the doors and dragged his wife and sons along for the ride, son of a man dead in the street before the Revolution ever took hold.

Ronan is the son of a legacy, a lie, son of a ghost in the old family plot. Kavinsky, with his marbled shoulders and mausoleum eyes, is something out of one of Robespierre’s leaflets. Foreign aristocracy, drinking blood instead of bread, laughing with it spilled all down his shirtfront.

 _And why shouldn’t it be rich boys like Joseph,_ Blue says in his mind. _Named for the carpenter, right? What a fucking laugh. What a fucking -_

 _We don’t know what he’s named for,_ Gansey had reminded her. _Probably his father._ Nobody had looked at Adam. Nobody had looked at Adam for so long that Adam had sighed and gotten up to go to his next job. His hands smeared with cheap ink from the presses, his trousers long and his bones sharp under his skin; Adam’s a poster boy for the guillotine crowd. It’s harder to hear Kavinsky laugh without thinking of Adam’s eyes in candlelight these days; harder to hear Kavinsky say _they’re saying she told them to eat cake_ without seeing his own hand reaching to blow the candle out and Adam’s snapping to his wrist to stop him. Adam saying _look at who you’re going to bed with_ , Adam kissing him and drawing blood, his ribs under Ronan’s palms from lack of bread.

It’s supposed to be easier to give things up when you can hear the sand in the hourglass running out, when you can hear the last bells for Mass dying out on the horizon, when there’s a ticket to Ireland from Declan burning a hole in Ronan’s pocket (hole; the inner circle, the inverse of a noose, the empty of Joseph Kavinsky’s eyes). But Adam got under his skin with his fingernails and his tongue; but Ronan is stood in the wrecked belly of a wrecked royalty and can’t walk away from Kavinsky’s sickle-moon smile; but when Ronan was born he was drowned in the water of a religion that says nothing really dies.

“I want to burn something again,” Kavinsky says.

At church, the priest says Lucifer was beautiful before he Fell. Lucifer was best-beloved of the Flock. Lucifer wants you to take his hand so, so badly. Ronan thinks it’s like a party game in the heyday of the Palace: only two of these are true.

“You always want to burn something,” Ronan says. Glass cracks under his feet when he steps forward, drawn despite himself. Kavinsky jumps from the furniture and something shatters where he lands. Ronan knows the feel of Adam’s ribs under his palms but Kavinsky has eyes you could drown in without ever drawing breath. Both make him think of the way screaming into the velvet dark echoes back.

“Come along, little princess,” Kavinsky beckons with a crooked finger, a sliver of pale skin. The rings on his hand flash like the wink of the guillotine blade in morning light. Ronan looks at the ruin of the bed, then back at Kavinsky.

Ronan follows Kavinsky’s shadow out of the bedchamber and down the hallway to the stairs. His skin is stinging with wax. He does not blow the candle out.

  
It’s not so much wanting to see, as being afraid of falling if he’s left in the dark.


End file.
